Meditating on the 20th century … La Jetée, Chris Marker's much-celebrated short film, made from a series of still images. Photograph: BFI

Chris Marker was a phantom, an escape artist, a shapeshifter. He told friends he came from Ulan Bator, Mongolia. Born in 1921 in a pleasant Parisian suburb, Christian-François Bouche-Villeneuve racked up many pseudonyms and monikers: Sandor Krasna, Jacopo Berenzi, Fritz Markassin. Early on, as if in anticipation of the new vocabularies and identities that would proliferate in the digital era, he signed himself Chris.Marker.

He rarely gave interviews and was happy to be represented by images of a cat. But he was no hermit or recluse. His elusiveness was a tool for creation. It furnished him with freedom. Untethered by biography, unshackled by celebrity, he was able to drift through the second half of the 20th century witnessing, documenting and meditating on its political and imaginative upheavals.

Across many fields – in graphic design, multimedia, but most of all in film – he made the activity of thinking about images, whether photographic or moving, seem both profound and playful. He had prominent admirers, among them Francis Ford Coppola and Terry Gilliam, the latter reworking his still-photograph-constructed time-travel masterpiece La Jetée (1962) as 12 Monkeys (1995). But his work, at once prolix and difficult to see, mostly appeared as clandestine and spectral as its maker.

A new survey at London's Whitechapel Gallery offers a rare opportunity to engage with a broad cross-section of Marker's protean productions, including a never-before-seen version of La Jetée with an alternative opening sequence. For co-curator Chris Darke, who frequently corresponded and also worked with Marker, the show reveals the ways in which the artist's "central subject was intelligence, a very particular, astute intelligence that's also full of political acuity, humour and lyricism".

The world that Marker navigated over the course of the 1950s was full of deconstruction and dreams. Colonised peoples everywhere were feverishly trying to create new societies. One of his earliest films, Statues Also Die (1953), a collaboration with Alain Resnais, is a startlingly bold critique of European approaches to African art. A voiceover, using the language of Afro-futurism – a school of thought that sees the abduction, transportation to the "new world" and ritualistic violence meted out to Africans during the slave trade as a form of proto-science fiction – claims: "We [the west] are the Martians of Africa. We disembark from our planet with our ways of seeing, with our white magic, and with our machines." The film was banned in France for 15 years.

Marker was instinctively cosmopolitan, but his perspective was subaltern rather than aristocratic. He journeyed to China, Israel and Cuba – societies grappling with modernisation, with fashioning brave new worlds. He was a passionate anti-imperialist, someone who always sided with the weak (he loved cats because, he claimed, "a cat is never on the side of power"), but he later worried that in his pre-1962 films he'd treated authoritarian regimes with kid gloves. Later works such as The Sixth Side of the Pentagon (1967), about a 100,000-strong anti-Vietnam war march, would be less partisan.

According to Naeem Mohaiemen, an award-winning film-maker preoccupied with histories of the Bangladeshi left, this tonal shift gave political documentarians a license to develop more equivocal voices. "In The Sixth Side his narration displays the capacity to speak, even within the white heat of the moment, about the possibilities of failure. He's not Norman Mailer, sounding like Olympus proclaiming from on high; Marker still had palpable affection for the movement, even as he critiqued it. That capacity was profoundly influential for my generation, as we struggled to make sense of revolutionary left politics from within the debris of a previous epoch's dreams."

Emiko Omori, director of the newly released documentary To Chris Marker, An Unsent Letter, spent the second world war in an internment camp for Japanese Americans. "Growing up in California," she recalls, "I came out of those camps not wanting to be Japanese. We are often stuck in our own upbringings, but his films opened so many doors of possibility, and my mind to other ways of seeing and relating."

Marker's films are often described as writerly, and he's regularly cited as an early master of the essay film – a ruminative, often self-reflexive form of non-fiction (other practitioners include Jean-Luc Godard, Adam Curtis and Mark Cousins), the increasing popularity of which was marked by a recent season at London's BFI Southbank. But his actual writings – poetry, current affairs essays, even a 1949 novel entitled The Forthright Spirit – are little known. The show's catalogue includes a translation of his essay on Cocteau's Orphée (1950) that is especially fascinating, argues Darke, "because it's Marker meditating about the poetic capacities of cinema before he becomes a film-maker".

Chris Marker's workbook for the creation of La Jetée

In fact, says Darke, "Marker was constantly exploring the relationship between word and image, page and screen". This interplay between text and image is at its most delightful in Marker's photo-essay book Coréennes (1958), and in Commentaires (1961), a collection of early film scripts that were a key influence on Richard Hollis's design for John Berger's Ways of Seeing (1972), a bestselling work whose analysis of the relationship between art and society led one critic to describe it as "Mao's Little Red Book for a generation of art students". Here, photos and graphic illustrations are as important as the words, which are generously distributed so that the text feels aphoristic, as quietly resonant as a haiku. Each page spread is spacious; not a clump of information to be absorbed, but a field of potential relations to be traversed.

Marker didn't regard artistic forms as sacred. He didn't believe in the primacy of celluloid or the cinema screen. He was continually embracing and experimenting with new technologies: one of his richest later works was a CD-Rom entitled Immemory (1997); he created Photoshop cartoon-collages for the French website Poptronics; the Whitechapel show includes a projection of Ouvroir: The Movie (2010), a tour of a museum he created on Second Life, as well as the UK premiere of Zapping Zone (Proposal for an Imaginary Television) (1990-94), a sprawling assemblage of videos, computers and light boxes.

"Marker was always interested in transformation," recalls Darke. This fascination with the ability of new technologies to transform ideas of human identity, social connection and the nature of memory makes him a strikingly contemporary figure whose work has been embraced by young art students as much as cinephiles. His claim to be a "bricoleur" – a collector of pre-existing visual material – is resonant now that the harvesting, assembling and curation of images has become as important as their creation. His fondness for revisiting old material and reusing it in new contexts resonates with the present era's unprecedented ability not only to store huge digital archives, but to click, drag and recontextualise their contents across limitless formats.

At a time when corporations and governments alike are hell-bent on surveilling and snooping on citizens, Marker's anonymity feels like a thrilling and prophetic act of resistance. His willingness to work collaboratively – whether as part of the group of directors (including Agnès Varda and Joris Ivens) that made the omnibus Far from Vietnam (1967) or with the Medvedkin Group, who worked on agit-garde productions documenting insurgent union members – signals not just a lack of ego, but a socialist strategy that's of great relevance to today's austerity-hit young artists.

Always on the move, sometimes against the tide; collecting, logging, speculating about images; teaching us that we don't have to be slaves to spectacle but can use photography as an instrument of thought – Marker's work still feels like liberation, a road map to newfoundlands. SS

A museum built by Chris Marker in Second Life, the online virtual world

I first saw La Jetée in a film history course at the University of British Columbia, in the early 1970s. I imagine that I would have read about it earlier, in passing, in works about science fiction cinema, but I doubt I had much sense of what it might be. And indeed, nothing I had read or seen had prepared me for it. Or perhaps everything had, which is essentially the same thing.

I can't remember another single work of art ever having had that immediate and powerful an impact, which of course makes the experience quite impossible to describe. As I experienced it, I think, it drove me, as RD Laing had it, out of my wretched mind. I left the lecture hall where it had been screened in an altered state, profoundly alone. I do know that I knew immediately that my sense of what science fiction could be had been permanently altered.

Part of what I find remarkable about this memory today was the temporally hermetic nature of the experience. I saw it, yet was effectively unable to see it again. It would be over a decade before I would happen to see it again, on television, its screening a rare event. Seeing a short foreign film, then, could be the equivalent of seeing a UFO, the experience surviving only as memory. The world of cultural artefacts was only atemporal in theory then, not yet literally and instantly atemporal. Carrying the memory of that screening's intensity for a decade after has become a touchstone for me. What would have happened had I been able to rewind? Had been able to rent or otherwise access a copy? It was as though I had witnessed a Mystery, and I could only remember that when something finally moved – and I realised that I had been breathlessly watching a sequence of still images – I very nearly screamed.

I was exposed to Chris Marker's work at a particularly impressionable age. He's been a huge influence. Bowie and I shared an admiration for La Jetée, so we contrived to pay homage to it in Jump, They Say. The idea of making those iconic still images move seemed both exciting and somehow a little sacrilegious. I was deeply relieved to hear that Mr Marker was pleased and not offended by the gesture.

One of the things I find so seductive about Marker's films is the sense of nostalgia that permeates much of his work, a tone of reminiscence as if you, the viewer, had a shared history with him. At the same time, one is never allowed to forget the constructed nature of memory. This is perfectly illustrated in the marvellous sequence in La Jetée when the time traveller and the woman visit a museum of natural history, an enchanted afternoon in an artificial Eden. In these frozen moments of happiness, it becomes possible to forget that some of the animals with which they cavort are already extinct, at the same time as the distinction between the living and the dead is temporarily removed.

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